An Archaeology of the Contemporary Era

The Age of Destruction

Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429806995
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

An Archaeology of the Contemporary Era approaches the contemporary age, between the late nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, as an archaeological period defined by specific material processes. It reflects on the theory and practice of the archaeology of the contemporary past from epistemological, political, ethical and aesthetic viewpoints, and characterises the present based on archaeological traces from the spatial, temporal and material excesses that define it. The materiality of our era, the book argues, and particularly its ruins and rubbish, reveals something profound, original and disturbing about humanity.

This is the first attempt at describing the contemporary era from an archaeological point of view. Global in scope, the book brings together case studies from every continent and considers sources from peripheral and rarely considered traditions, meanwhile engaging in an interdisciplinary dialogue with philosophy, anthropology, history and geography.

An Archaeology of the Contemporary Era will be essential reading for students and practitioners of the archaeology of the contemporary past, historical archaeology and archaeological theory. It will also be of interest to anybody concerned with globalisation, modernity and the Anthropocene.

1 An archaeology of the contemporary era

THIS BOOKS STARTS from the idea that we are living in a unique era and that this era can be defined in archaeological terms. Even more, it argues that it is archaeology that can better define our age, because ours is, first and foremost, a time of material excess. The current popularity of neomaterialist and similar approaches in the social sciences and the humanities would probably never had happened without the feeling of global crisis provoked by such material excess. The situation should then be favourable for an archaeology that addresses this exceptional saturation of things and its manifold effects. Such should be, in my opinion, one of the main tasks of an archaeology of the contemporary world. This, however, is not necessarily the case in this very heterogeneous and fast-growing field. The aim of this chapter, then, is to offer a reflection on the nature of the specific contemporary archaeology that is espoused here. I will thus start by exploring the diversity of the field and its regional traditions, so as to locate my own research, and then will defend the usefulness of archaeology to characterise the era in which we live. This, of course, begs a series of questions: How can we define the present age archaeologically? What kind of knowledge is obtained by applying the archaeological gaze to the present? In which way is this knowledge different to that produced by other disciplines?

■ Archaeologies of the contemporary past

This book is an archaeological examination of the recent past and the present—an archaeology of the contemporary era. What is contemporary archaeology, however, and even “contemporary”, is far from obvious. It is not my intention to provide here a detailed overview of the archaeology of the contemporary past and its genealogy as this has been done elsewhere (Buchli and Lucas 2001a; Harrison and Schofield 2010; Harrison 2011, 2016; Graves-Brown et al. 2013; Harrison and Breithoff 2017), but some clarifications are needed to contextualise the present work within the extant traditions. Despite its youth, the archaeology of the contemporary past has a convoluted history, since it was invented several times in different places. As we know it today, we can trace its birth to the publication of Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past (2001a), an edited volume by Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas that set the theoretical agenda for the following years. However, there had been a previous attempt two decades before at investigating the present from an archaeological point of view. The “archaeology of us”, as it was called (Gould and Schiffer 1981), emerged in the intellectual environment of the New Archaeology of the 1960s and 1970s with its quest for cultural laws. The archaeology of us had a clear debt with ethnoarchaeology, but moved away from it in two important ways: as its name implied, it focused on modern industrial societies, instead of traditional ones, and it did so without the analogical imperative that was the rationale for ethnoarchaeological work. The idea was to study “our” society (that is, contemporary Western society) as a goal in itself and not just to test, refine and expand archaeological interpretations, as was the aim of ethnoarchaeology.

Despite its relevance in shaping a new theoretical paradigm—behavioural archaeology (LaMotta and Schiffer 2001)—and the success of one of the main initiatives associated to the field—the Garbage Project (Rathje and Murphy 1992; Rathje 2001), this kind of contemporary archaeology remained marginal in the discipline as a whole, perhaps too much associated with its founding fathers (Gould 2007: 16). It is thus not possible to trace a direct ancestral link between the archaeology of us and the one proposed by Buchli and Lucas, although the work of Schiffer and Rathje was definitely in their minds (Buchli and Lucas 2001a: 4–6; Rathje 2001). Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past was mainly influenced by post-structuralism, modern material culture studies and British post-processual archaeology, which had been investigating Western materiality since the 1980s (Shanks and Tilley 1987: 172–239; Buchli 1999; Buchli and Lucas 2001a: 7). Other sources of inspiration can be found—such as industrial archaeology (Orange 2008; Belford 2014; Palmer and Orange 2016) and heritage studies and management, particularly the work of English Heritage (Bradley et al. 2004)—but the relevance of Schiffer, Gould and Rathje in opening the present to archaeological scrutiny should not be underestimated.

This genealogy forgets at least two important developments, one theoretical, the other practical. Regarding the theoretical, it is important to mention the pioneering work of French archaeologists Philippe Bruneau and Pierre-Yves Balut (1982).¹ More than three decades ago, they proposed some ideas that are becoming common currency today. They defended that archaeology should study recent periods that had been neglected hitherto, such as the nineteenth century (this was quite revolutionary in continental European archaeology), but also the present itself. However, the proposal is more radical than a mere archaeology of the contemporary. Bruneau and Balut suggested that when the time limit of archaeology is shattered, at least three things happen: first, archaeology is forced to look for something else than the age criterion to define itself; they argue, following a very French tradition initiated by Leroi-Gourhan (1945) in the wake of Marcel Mauss, that this something has to be “all the creations of human labour” (Bruneau and Balut 1982: 9) or, to put it in a more anthropological way, technical systems (Lemonnier 1992, 2012). Technical systems cover all materiality, including the most humble and banal things, and from this point of view, archaeology is situated in a better position than art history, which also deals with contemporary material culture but of a very specific kind. Furthermore, technical systems are considered to have their own agency: “they do not ‘reflect’ ideas, institutions, etc of society . . . they are also motors that modify them and contribute to their explanation” (Bruneau and Balut 1982: 10).

Another important consequence that Bruneau and Balut saw in contemporary archaeology is that, by looking at the present, the discipline necessarily moves beyond excavation, which can no longer define a field that is forced to look at the surface (Bruneau and Balut 1982: 6–8). Bruneau (1986) himself studied the archaeology of French Catholicism (from plaster statues to reproductions of the cave of Lourdes). This turn to the surface has been retaken recently by different archaeologists (Harrison 2011; Kobiałka 2013). Last but not least, an archaeology of the modern and contemporary, Bruneau and Balut argue, implies the dépériodisation of the discipline. When archaeology is concerned with all eras, it is no longer associated with any: “Modern and contemporary archaeology gives rise necessarily to a ‘general archaeology’” (Bruneau and Balut 1982: 5). This is also in line with current perspectives (Harrison 2011), although the French archaeologists insist that a general archaeology is “deperiodised” but not “dehistoricised” (Bruneau and Balut 1982: 18). A concern with the historical is a continental European tradition that is perhaps less present in the British tradition (cf. Harrison and Schofield 2010). As it happened with American contemporary archaeology, however, the French version remained self-contained and had little if any impact outside the country.

Another development that is rarely considered comes from what is variously described as rescue, preventive, commercial, or contract archaeology in Europe and Cultural Resource Management (CRM) in the United States. Whereas the role of heritage management in the development of contemporary archaeology has been widely recognised in the United Kingdom, it is not so much the case in continental Europe (but see Hurard et al. 2014). This is because archaeologists working in the heritage sector in Spain, France, or Germany have seldom theorised about their own practice—or at least have left little written proof of such theorisation. Nevertheless, preventive archaeology, as it is usually known in France (where this kind of archaeology is largely conducted by a State agency, INRAP, and not just by private contractors), has been forced to deal with the archaeological record of the most recent past on a daily basis. This is true also in the British case, but here archaeologists from the heritage sector have published more about landscapes and the built environment than about excavations (Cocroft and Thomas 2003; Buchli et al. 2004; Penrose 2007; Schofield and Cocroft 2009). In continental Europe, instead, it has been mostly the past encountered through digging, in the context of urban interventions or in assessing the impact of large infrastructures in the countryside, that has elicited more reflection.

Thus, modern conflict archaeology owes an outstanding debt to preventive archaeology throughout the continent: First World War and Second World War battlefields, Spanish Civil War trenches and Nazi Lagern were first surveyed and excavated as part of archaeological impact assessment and mitigation projects during the 1980s and 1990s (e.g. Kernd’l 1992; Desfossés 1997; Ibel 2002; Pérez-Juez et al. 2002; Van Hollebeeke et al. 2014). Unfortunately, most of these works have remained unpublished or were only disseminated in obscure local journals (Van Hollebeeke et al. 2014). They have been incorporated into larger syntheses only recently (Saunders 2007; Desfossés et al. 2008; Theune 2010, 2016; Carpentier and Marcigny 2014; González-Ruibal 2016a). Preventive archaeology has not been restricted to conflict, though: it has also been actively involved in investigating urban and rural history (Bellan and Journout 2011). The excavations in modern metropolises like Paris, Marseilles, or Lyon have enabled a deeper understanding of the massive changes occurring in these cities in recent times and have situated urban transformation in its long-term context (Hurard et al. 2014). From this point of view, preventive archaeology is particularly helpful for thinking the contemporary in relation to other times, thus avoiding the danger of presentism. Preventive archaeology has also brought to light the most traumatic side of Europe’s recent urban history: bombed-out buildings, air raid shelters, forced labour camps (Moshenska 2009a; Miró and Ramos 2011; Pollock and Bernbeck 2015). Slum clearance, ghettoisation, impoverishment, racial segregation and other negative urban phenomena characteristic of modernity have been documented as well, through preventive or contract archaeology in Europe, Australia and North America. Although the focus has been (and still is) predominantly on the nineteenth century, there are a number of projects that have shown concern with the most recent urban past, particularly in the United States, although this have been sometimes carried out in the context of academic research (Mullins 2006; Praetzellis 2007; Mullins and Jones 2011; McAtackney and Ryzewski 2017). Other notable urban projects have been carried out in Europe, South Africa and South America (Hall 2006; Souza 2014; McAtackney and Ryzewski 2017). Recent reviews of the archaeology of modern cities by British archaeologists, despite noting the relevance of the contemporary past, mention very few examples of research that actually takes it into account (Symonds 2004; Davies and Parker 2016). Contemporary archaeology has often focused on creative or experimental interventions in the present or the very recent past, disregarding serious chronotypological studies of the kind that have been conducted in historical archaeology. While maybe not as exciting as other kind of studies (and definitely less profitable in academic terms), they are essential for a proper understanding of the materiality of the contemporary era. It can be expected that people with experience in rescue archaeology in urban and other contexts will be the ones with more to offer (e.g. Souza 2013a, 2013b; Belford 2014; Fraga 2017), although some analyses of twentieth-century materials can also be found in historical archaeology research projects (Casella and Croucher 2010). So far, it is perhaps in conflict archaeology where detailed empirical analyses of twentieth-century material culture can be more commonly found—and not restricted to military objects (e.g. Osgood and Brown 2009; Schnitzler et al. 2013).

There is a third development that should be mentioned, even if its relevance in the development of contemporary archaeology is more readily recognised: forensic archaeology (e.g. Buchli and Lucas 2001a; Doretti and Fondebrider 2001). This has been central in the emergence of contemporary archaeologies in South America and Spain (González-Ruibal 2007; Gutiérrez 2009; Funari et al. 2010; Renshaw 2011). In both Argentina and Spain, the application of archaeology to forensic contexts arose from the need to make justice, bring therapeutic closure and meet a social demand for truth and reparation (Ferrándiz 2006, 2013; Doretti and Fondebrider 2001; Bernardi and Fondebrider 2007). Archaeological goals per se were (understandably) of secondary importance: the discipline was perceived mostly as a set of techniques that enabled the careful recovery of bodies, identification of individuals and documentation of traces of violence—a situation that has been common in other contexts as well (Connor and Scott 2001). However, research into crimes against humanity using archaeological methods gradually led, in both countries, to a wider archaeological investigation of political violence in which issues other than extrajudicial killings were taken into consideration, including memory, landscape, technologies and spaces of repression, political identities, etc. (Zarankin and Niro 2006; Zarankin and Salerno 2008; Zarankin and Funari 2008; Ríos et al. 2008; Salerno et al. 2012; Etxeberria and Pla 2014; González-Ruibal 2016a, 2017).

These diverse genealogies are behind different practices and approaches within the field of contemporary archaeology. Thus, the European tradition tends to privilege excavation, documentation, objects, depth and history (Bellan and Journot 2011), whereas British and Nordic practitioners are more interested in survey, landscape, anthropology and aesthetics (Andreassen et al. 2010; Harrison and Schofield 2010; Pétursdóttir and Olsen 2014a; McAtackney and Penrose 2016). The Latin paradigm, in turn, is more concerned with politics, trauma, conflict and exhumation (Zarankin and Funari 2008). Finally, contemporary archaeology in North America and Australia can be seen in many ways as an extension of historical archaeology and its agenda. Even if both subfields may seem to intersect little at times (Harrison 2016: 168–170), the divergence is definitely greater in Europe than in North America, where many contemporary archaeologists have been trained as historical archaeologists and their work cuts across both areas of expertise and chronological frameworks (e.g. Wilkie 2000; Mullins 2006, 2017; Dawdy 2010, 2016).

Historiographical traditions and national histories explain these diverse trajectories and particularly their political ramifications, which will be dealt with in more detail in Chapter 3. With its focus on dark modernities, the present work avowedly identifies itself primarily with the European and Latin traditions. However, it aligns itself with the British and Scandinavian perspective in its concern with theory and creative experimentation and finds common ground with historical archaeology through an understanding of the contemporary as part of the wider process of modernity and capitalism (Orser 1996; Hall 2000; Leone and Knauf 2015). Cross-breeding, after all, is common in contemporary archaeology and the trends described above should in no case be taken as self-contained and isolated, nor national traditions as uniform.

■ What is “contemporary”?

The concept of “contemporary” has as diverse meanings as the archaeology that studies it. For many modern historians in the English-speaking world, contemporary history usually refers to the period after the Second World War. This perspective is adopted by some archaeology of the contemporary past as well: thus, the eloquent (and evocative) title of Harrison and Schofield’s book (2010) After Modernity, indicates that the authors are primarily concerned with the most recent past—although the book encompasses the twentieth century as a whole. Schofield (2005: 29) has argued that “contemporary past” should be restricted to the period of which we have personal experience, and “recent past” used for the time that, while being near to us, is already removed from direct experience.

In other traditions, the British concept of the contemporary is conveyed by different terms: in Spanish the words actual (“current”) and presente are used to refer to the period of which we have personal experience, a meaning covered by the term présent in French. The history after the Second World War is thus identified as historia actual or historia del presente in Spain and Latin America—see Soto Gamboa (2004) for an excellent review—and histoire du temps présent or histoire immédiate in France (Leduc 1999: 78–83). In Germany, the concept Gegenwartgeschichte (history of the present) is used, although it is perhaps not as common as in the French-Spanish tradition. In all cases, the distinctiveness of the present as a historical period lies in its being a lived past for the historian (Soto Gamboa 2004: 106). Instead, contemporary history in continental Europe refers to the era that started with the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century. Thus, French archaeologists tend to consider the period comprised between 1789 and the present as contemporary archaeology and the period before the Revolution as modern archaeology (Bruneau and Balut 1982; Bellan and Journot 2011), a periodisation that in theory would also work for Spain. In practice, archaeologists working on the last two centuries usually label their investigations “industrial archaeology” (Cano Sanchís 2007), rather than contemporary archaeology, due to their focus on factories and related heritage. In Sweden, it has been argued that contemporary archaeology should cover the period beginning around 1850, since historical archaeologists usually stop at that time (Burström 2009a: 23).

These different conceptualisations are of more than terminological consequence, because what is considered contemporary or coeval colours the way in which history is perceived and experienced and societies classified and even hierarchised (see Fabian 1983). I have argued elsewhere that it is not only our personal memories that have to be taken into account to define the contemporary, but the collective memory in which we have been socialised, including experiences transmitted by parents and grandparents (González-Ruibal 2008: 248). In non-Western contexts, then, contemporary archaeology may have to widen its scope to take into account things that happened hundreds of years ago, but are perceived in many ways as contemporary: in my research in Ethiopia (González-Ruibal 2014a), I have worked with communities for which the sixteenth century is experientially closer than the 1900s is for most of us, and therefore contemporary in many respects. But there is no need to go far: my grandmother referred tales of the Napoleonic invasion of her village as if it had occurred in her lifetime. Note that I do not mean that all remembered past should be understood as contemporary: only the one that is considered as actual part of the present. Contemporaneity can also be purposefully created through rituals, performances and seasonal celebrations (Zerubavel 2003: 47). Societies that have experienced traumatic events (such as genocide, total war, or civil conflict) may also have an extended or transgenerational notion of contemporaneity (Hirsch 2008; Faúndez and Cornejo 2010). Contemporary time, then, cannot be immediately equated with the time of direct, personal experience. It is a culture-specific category that requires flexibility on the part o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 An Archaeology of the Contemporary Era
• 2 Ruins
• 3 Politics
• 4 Ethics
• 5 Aesthetics
• 6 Time
• 7 Space
• 8 Materiality
• 9 Concluding Remarks: Beyond the Anthropocene
• References
• Index